Donncha vs the taxman vs the postman

How are you supposed to do business in Ireland when tax forms don’t come on time? Here’s a snippet from a form P30 I got from Revenue this morning.

A form that should be filled out before February 14th arrived on March 30th. A form that warns that there may be penalties for late payment. Sheesh. Oh, and it arrived opened. Not the first time that happened either.

This morning I finally paid my motor tax. Instead of getting the nice simple online registration form and pin number I got a “final reminder” sometime in February warning that the police would be called if the tax wasn’t paid within ten days. I didn’t and they weren’t. I called the garage instead who sent me a form to get another vehicle registration form, which I already have. I have two of them now, one must go back.

We know for a fact that mail has been lost. A letter that Jacinta was expecting last year vanished without a trace. Maybe it’s in some sorting office somewhere stuck behind a bin.

An Post need to get their act together and stop losing mail and delivering late.

Edit: oh, and next time you buy a second hand car you’ll have to pay the motor tax for the time the car was in the garage. You’re not supposed to, but it’s happened to me on my last two cars. I’ve had to pay for the month previous to purchasing the car because the tax just happened to run out before I bought it. The garage is supposed to register the car as off the road but that obviously doesn’t work.

Edit: It’s April 4th. I just received a tax assasement from Revenue dated January 10th. It had no address on the form, but someone had hand written the address on a slip of paper which was stapled to that form. We got an awful shock until we realised the issue date because we’ve sent Revenue big fat cheques since January. gulp!

10 Replies to “Donncha vs the taxman vs the postman”

I remember my old postman who, wouldn’t deliver post on Wednesdays , not once in 10 years did he bring us post on Wednesdays, and rarely delivered it before 2pm. It was amazing the difference in service when he would either get help at Christmas or he would have someone to cover his summer holidays.

Several of my friends who live around my area noted similar problems, too. in one case, one was left a “we attempted to deliver, but you weren’t in” docket — she saw the docket arriving in the front door while she sat in the kitchen with her kids! When she went to the local depot was told “oh that must have been lifted”, ie. stolen, by one of the postal staff, from the depot. This was delivered in a casual tone, as if that’s normal. 🙁 Nowadays they get their parcels delivered to their parents’ house in Northern Ireland instead.

Unfortunately, this wasn’t an option for me. I eventually confronted my local postie (who’s a really nice bloke, it turns out) — he told me that on my route, there’s no longer a parcel delivery postman; they’ve been downsized.
Instead, the letter-delivery posties (on bikes or on foot) are expected to maybe do a parcel delivery or two, if they happen to have driven into work. There’s no guaranteed quality of service there at all for parcels.

Rumour has it, and experience seems to bear this out — if they’re stuck, they won’t bother attempting to deliver the parcel. They’ll just post a “we attempted delivery, but you weren’t in” notice through the door, and the recipient has to come to the depot themselves to pick it up.

Anyway, he did me a favour and since then, he’s done a great job of looking after us, all credit to him; no missing post, and no delayed parcels.

However:

Thanks a bunch, Fianna Fail. This is where the past 10 years of record tax income has gone — to kill off one of the essential services that government is responsible for providing! I’m fucking livid about this. I shouldn’t *HAVE* to rely on our local postie going beyond the call of duty to help us out. Why are there no parcel-delivery posties employed on my Dublin-city-centre route? it’s absolutely absurd.

What? Those two situations are terrible, no post on Wednesdays and parcels aren’t delivered? Sounds even worse than Blarney really.

Our local postman is a nice guy too, and I don’t know where to lay the blame, but our post is consistently late. I rarely get my monthly issue of the National Geographic before the first week of the month, if memory serves. I certainly see it in the shops before I get my grubby hands on the same copy.

The government here are the same. They go for the easy targets. If I don’t get my car taxed on time I get an 80 quid fine in the post. Thanks to their computers. That’s because, as a law abiding citizen, the computer knows I’m the owner. If, however, I’m driving a car that I know they don’t know about I can drive around tax free, insurance free and MOT free happy in the knowledge that I can drive like an idiot.

We had a problem like this when we lived in Scotland. It seems that any games I ordered from an online store never got delivered. It probably wasn’t very bright of the sender to mark the parcel “Nintendo Games – Handle With Care!” Anyway, I went to the central delivery office and told them, very politely, that my mail was getting stolen. In most countries, that’s a very serious offence. The problem went away very quickly — seems there was a small group of posties who were keeping anything they took a fancy to, and they got fired and prosecuted.

I miss Saturday deliveries. We had them in Scotland, but not in Canada.

The Golden Compass
First of a three part fantasy/sci-fi series. Some people hate it because of it's anti God message but it's a great read. I found it hard to put down. There's even a Snopes article about the film adaptation.

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